ArcGIS includes a Living Atlas of the World with beautiful and authoritative maps on thousands of topics. Explore maps and data from Esri and thousands of other organizations and combine them with your own data to create new maps and applications.

Imagery

ArcGIS includes detailed imagery of the world, which reveals both the present state of the planet and change over time. These image layers enable you to view recent, high-resolution imagery for most of the world; lower-resolution imagery of the planet updated daily; and near real-time imagery for parts of the world affected by major events, such as natural disasters. This includes intelligent layers that enable you to restyle the imagery to highlight specific characteristics, such as healthy vegetation.

Basemaps

ArcGIS includes a suite of basemaps that provide reference maps for our world and context for your work. These maps are built from the best available data from a community of authoritative data providers and presented in multiple cartographic styles. The maps are designed to emphasize different views of our world, from physical to political. You can choose the basemap that is most appropriate for your map or app.

Demographics and Lifestyle

ArcGIS includes a comprehensive set of demographic and lifestyle maps of the United States and more than 120 other countries. This includes recent demographic and Tapestry Segmentation lifestyle information such as total population, family size, household income, and more. It also includes consumer spending information on many types of products. This information can be accessed as ready-to-use map layers, including preconfigured pop-up windows, which can be restyled and added to your maps and apps.

Boundaries and Places

People commonly define themselves by the places in which they live and work, ranging from a continental scale to country, region, state, or local neighborhood. These places are typically defined by their boundaries. ArcGIS includes a set of map layers that describe these boundaries at many levels of geography, including countries, administrative areas, postal codes, and more. You can use these boundaries and place layers for simple geographic context or to aggregate your own data to visualize on a map.

Landscape

The collection of landscape maps and layers available through ArcGIS covers a wide set of topics related to our natural and man-made environments, including agriculture, wildlife, elevation, hydrology, and weather. Landscape analysis underpins much of our land-use planning and how we manage our natural resources and relationship with the environment. As part of this collection, Esri has assembled best available data from many public sources and provided the content in an easy-to-use collection of layers, which can be used to make better informed decisions.

Community Maps

You can contribute to several maps through our Community Maps Program to make them more useful to your organization and others. Thousands of ArcGIS users have improved the coverage and quality of our maps by providing access to their map data and imagery. Join the growing list of organizations that contribute their content to a living global atlas of online maps and geographic information.

Transportation

ArcGIS includes a number of maps and layers that describe the systems that people use to move between places. This includes a variety of global, national, and local maps on various topics from infrastructure projects to rest areas. Some of these layers are dynamic, such as the live World Traffic map, which is updated every few minutes with data on traffic incidents and congestion.

Urban Systems

Over half of the world’s population now lives in cities, and the percentage is growing. This urbanization has a profound impact on our lives, and it presents unique challenges for managing urban systems. This collection of maps and layers provides useful information, such as open space, highway access and noise pollution, to help cities implement innovative solutions for the complex problems they face. This includes standard layers that can be used to compare different cities as well as detailed urban landscapes that can be used for visualization and analysis.

Earth Observations

ArcGIS Online includes a rich collection of earth observation maps and layers that describe our planet’s current conditions, from earthquakes and fires to severe weather and hurricanes, as well as changes over time. This includes a set of live feed layers featuring frequently updated data from several sources, as well as scientific data presenting information on our planet, such as soil moisture and snowpack, over several years.

Historical Maps

ArcGIS includes a rich set of historical maps that illustrate the world as it existed decades and even centuries ago. These maps describe the political, cultural, and physical aspects of our world, providing a revealing glimpse into the past and a better understanding of how our world has evolved over time. This collection includes scanned raster maps presented as both static map layers and dynamic image layers, which can be viewed individually as a basemap or displayed with a current basemap for comparison purposes.

Explore the Living Atlas.